Sleeping Beauty
by littledaybreaker
Summary: HC angst. Oneshot, character death. Love is the whole human experience under one roof. Happiness, anger, celebration, birth, life, death.


_Boy you're gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time  
Boy you're gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time_

_The Beatles_

"Horatio."

He stops kissing her for the split second it takes to reply. "What?"

"We shouldn't." He kisses her fully clothed shoulder. "Rather, we can't."

"Why not?" he wants, now, her bare shoulder. He moves to remove her shirt and she resists, pulling his hands away, holding them suspended in front of the two of the, like a bridge. A barrier. "Don't you love me?" he whines like a child.

"It's…it's nothing. We just can't do this, Horatio."

"Do you love me?"

She looks down, suddenly, intensely, interested in their locked hands. "I said it's nothing."

He tilts her face up, level with his. "Answer me, Calleigh."

She looks straight into his purposeful blue eyes, matches them with her own. "Yes," she says, and is amazed when it comes out intelligibly.

"Then why can't we?" he feels like a desperately hormonal fifteen-year-old boy, and tries to control it for her sake.

"It's not that I don't want to…" she struggles for the words. _Actions speak louder, _she thinks, as clichéd as it is, and turns around, breathes sharply, and removes the blue-gray shirt.

The first thing he sees when she does is a large patch of shiny, baby-pink skin about seven inches across her back, then under it, more shiny, pink scars, some raised, some flat.

"Oh," is all he can think to say. "How…?"

"My father." She turns to face him. "I didn't…"

He presses a finger to her lips. "I understand." They stand in silence like this for several minutes, Calleigh without a shirt and Horatio's hormones suddenly winding down. He strokes her back, whispers comfort to her, and she realizes, incredulously, that she is crying.

"I'm not sad," she says, half-laughing. "I don't know why I'm crying."

"It's okay." He runs a hand through her gorgeous hair and sighs. "We don't have to, Calleigh."

"Horatio?"

"Yes?" he kisses her hair lightly, light enough that she can't feel it through the thickness.

"Hold me."

He gently lets go of her body and leaves the shirt abandoned. He wants to carry her to the bedroom, wants to baby her and undo what he's just been shown from burning behind his eyelids, but he knows that it won't go over well. Instead he takes her hand gently and leads her down the hall, because even if he can't change the past, the future is his.

She is asleep the second he lays her down in the bed, and he wonders if she's ever shown anyone what she showed him, or if all previous encounters had been stopped and not picked up. The idea of Calleigh as a virgin is as outlandish as it is perfectly ordinary. She is one of those people capable of being seen in two lights: on one hand, she is somewhat like somebody's little sister, cheery and optimistic and utterly adorable, and on the other she is incredibly sexy and seductive. Both sides in one night, Horatio thinks, and rolls out of bed. Calleigh stirs at the movement, and he wills her back to sleep, grateful when she simply turns over. He walks out of the apartment and aimlessly down the hallway. Her smell, the scars, overwhelmed him. He feels murderous, he feels angry, and he feels like he wants to rip her father to shreds. He could do it without regret, too, and that terrifies him. He needs fresh air. His face and lungs are burning.

He walks for about twenty minutes, aimlessly up and down the apartment hallway, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of other people, both happy families and broken human beings, then goes back to his own apartment, where Calleigh is sitting on his sofa, looking out the window, wearing one of his silk shirts.

"I couldn't find mine," she explains, and then starts to cry.

"Calleigh, are you okay?"

She doesn't answer him.

He leaves the house to beat the shit out of her father, and ends up halfway across the other end of town, at her house. He tries the door and nearly laughs out loud when it opens. He doesn't know what he's looking for. All he knows is that it's incredibly Calleigh-ish to leave her door unlocked in Miami, Florida. He finds it surprisingly less organized than he'd expected, but there is, he suspects, method to the madness. And things are sorted by color. He laughs—all the green candleholders on one side of the table, all the red on the other, even her movies (she has a considerable amount of movies) and CDs (even more) are sorted by color. He shakes his head, as if he's waking up, and can't remember why he's in her house. He goes to her bedroom and takes a shirt out of the dresser, then leaves the house almost as spontaneously as he entered.

Fifteen minutes pass at Horatio's apartment, then twenty. Calleigh stops thinking and starts worrying. It's not like him to be gone so long. She tugs on the shirt and pulls it down, then walks out of his apartment and into the night air.

She's gone when he returns, just after dark. He was driving aimlessly, trying to quell his feelings so that he didn't go home to her angry, but she is gone. This isn't like Calleigh. He checks his kitchen table for messages; he checks the bedroom and the bathroom. He walks all twenty-seven floors of his apartment, and then he leaves to retrace his steps.

When the night shift supervisor calls him on his cell phone, Horatio knows that there's trouble. He has managed to blank out most of the conversation, but parts swim in his brain as he drives back to HQ. _One of yours…ballistics…instantly. _Alexx hugs him when he walks through the door, but he just puts on his sunglasses. "Let's get to work," he says dramatically, but Alexx knows Horatio better than he thinks she does, and she doesn't fall for it. "Why don't you come with me, Horatio?"

He stays in the morgue that night because he can't imagine leaving Calleigh alone. It doesn't feel real. He hasn't cried, or eaten, or gone home since Alexx found him. He just sits, holding her hand (which is cold—not cool like it usually is, but cold and hard) and singing softly, waiting for her to wake up. Sleeping beauty.


End file.
